[217] Nitobé, Bushido, p. 67.
[218] The statement has obtained wide currency that all the banks in Japan employ only Chinese as cashiers because they cannot find honest Japanese for these positions of trust. Chinese are sometimes employed in Japanese banks, but the true reason for their employment is not the one here assigned. One well qualified to speak authoritatively on this subject says:
Chinese bankers and cashiers are largely Shansi men, that is, men from the province of Shansi, where the profession of banking has become hereditary in a large number of families. They are all, or nearly all, members of the powerful organization known as the Bankers’ Guild, which has branches in every part of the Empire. The Bankers’ Guild has discovered that it is practically impossible to conduct large financial operations without honesty; and it therefore enforces honesty by means of a discipline that is as rigorous ... as that of the New York Stock Exchange.... If a Chinese banker breaks faith, violates a contract, or betrays a trust, he is expelled from his guild and the doors of banks are closed against him for all time. In the first place, therefore, the Chinese cashier is honest because honesty is a condition of his business existence. He may not be honest in other respects,—often he is not,—but he is absolutely honest in the handling of money. In the second place, he is probably the most expert man living in the rapid calculation of exchanges. The monetary system of his country is the most confused, chaotic, and complicated system in the world. There are fifteen or twenty different kinds of taels, no one of which bears a fixed relation to any other, or to any established monetary standard.... The necessity of dealing in some way with this great mass of unstable and fluctuating currency and of earning a subsistence from it has made the Chinese cashier one of the most expert of living accountants. He will solve difficult monetary problems by short cuts of mental arithmetic, and he calculates exchanges to eight points of decimals. In the third place, the Chinese cashier counts and manipulates bank bills and coins with extraordinary skill and accuracy. I have had dealings with him in many parts of the Far East, but I cannot remember ever to have seen him count a sum of money twice, and I have never caught him in an error....
Now, when you get a man whose honesty is guaranteed by his guild, whose manipulation of money is phenomenally dexterous, and who can calculate exchanges to eight points of decimals, you have an ideal cashier; and if Japanese bankers employ him, it shows their good business sense rather than their distrust of their own people. But all Japanese bankers do not employ him. In some of the largest banks in Tokyo, Kioto, and Osaka there are no Chinese at all—or at least I have never seen any. This explanation would not be worth, perhaps, the space that I have given to it, if the story of the Chinese cashier had not been so widely circulated, and if it were not typical of a whole class of cases in which the Japanese are misjudged on the basis of a single incident or a solitary fact.—George Kennan, “Are the Japanese Honest?” the New York Outlook for August 31, 1912.
[219] “If the descendants of the samurai can erect a standard of commercial integrity at all comparable to their fine record for courage and loyalty, we shall be their debtors, not they ours.”—The New York Nation for July 30, 1908, p. 90.
[220] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 343.
[221] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 331.
[222] Ibid. vol. ii, p. 319.
[223] Ibid. vol. ii, p. 230.
[224] “I certainly consider that the courage and devotion of the Japanese soldiers during the late war was to a great extent the result of this systematic moral instruction and training in schools.”—Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 344.